Why do I need to know lisp in 2021? Any practical real use besides being used as example in books about computation?
Common Lisp Books
31–39 of 39 posts
Re: Common Lisp Books
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it helps, I'm rather fond of this explanation: https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html Especially this part, from toward the beginning: > Before I get into the details of what Y actually is, I'd like to address the question of why you, as a programmer, should bother to learn about it. To be honest, there aren't a lot of good nuts-and-bolts practical reasons for learning about Y. Even though it does have a few pr…
Thanks for the link I'll take a look. I agree that you don't need to understand y to be an effective lisper. I have used lisp and various other functional languages over the years in various projects and there wasn't a use case for y combinator...
Its official use case is hacking recursion into a language that doesn't support recursion, but does have first-class functions. To the best of my knowledge, the only language that fits this description is the lambda calculus itself.
There is a paper, Y in Practical Programs ( https://blog.klipse.tech/assets/y-in-practical-programs.pdf) that presents some interesting things you can layer on top of the technique. I'll leave it up to others to debate whether doing so is genuinely practical, or more of a game of functional code golf.
Re: Common Lisp Books
#33This list is not very fresh or exhaustive; for instance, does not contain two recent Apress books, which are Vsevolod Domkin's Programming Algorithms in Lisp and Michał "phoe" Herda's The Common Lisp Condition System.
(Disclosure: I was the technical reviewer for the former and I wrote the latter.)
Re: Common Lisp Books
#34Why do I need to know lisp in 2021? Any practical real use besides being used as example in books about computation?
Speaking purely for myself, I like lisp because I find it embodies a certain pure joy of hacking that I don't find to be quite as present in other more popular languages that I use.
Re: Common Lisp Books
#35On the off-chance that someone reading this is also interested in algorithmic composition:
https://michael-edwards.org/sc/index.html
https://michael-edwards.org/sc/liner.html
“slippery chicken is an open-source Common Lisp environment for declarative or generative algorithmic composition building on CLM, CMN, CM, MusicXML and Lilypond for score, sound file, and/or MIDI file outputs and the integration of these into closely aligned hybrid acoustic-electronic pieces of music.”
…made by (the extremely awesome) Michael Edwards:
https://michael-edwards.org/
Re: Common Lisp Books
#36Why do I need to know lisp in 2021? Any practical real use besides being used as example in books about computation?
If you are using a language that supports live editing for example and thus reveals the archaic nature of edit compile test cycle of unproductive programming; you probably need not learn Lisp. This is just one property and there are many more but one which is immediately evident.
Re: Common Lisp Books
#37Good list. I think that I own all published Common Lisp books, and most Prolog and Smalltalk books. I prefer reading books to excess time browsing the web and social media. Including non-technical books, I would be embarrassed to admit how much time I spend reading every week.
A self plug: you can get free PDF/ePub/Kindle versions of my Common Lisp book on my personal web site (https://markwatson.com)
Re: Common Lisp Books
#38Looks like someone else mentioned PAIP. I’d add “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” as well.
More people should really read this book. Its great that functional programing is on the rise, but the shitty object systems of C++ and Java have poisoned OOP in most people's mind. CLOS is an awesome object system and TAOTMP really highlights what you can do with a good object system.
Functional programing is still awesome, but for high-level work I think the multiparadigm languages like Scala, Swift, and CL are the way to go.
Re: Common Lisp Books
#39How can I learn enough Lisp to understand Emacs well?
This is how I'm traveling that journey:
I started with a simple .org file. Whenever I encountered a problem, a question, or a confusing topic, I would simply add a todo heading.
Over time, I slowly learned Org-mode, then Babel, then transitioned to Org-Roam. I learned enough of Emacs Lisp, then learned Clojure, then tried other Lisps like Fennel. Today, I'm comfortably writing my own little elisp packages, sharing tips with my colleagues, chasing performance bottlenecks, and still learning.
Just start with a simple todo list.